Visual Imagery

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Visual Imagery

• The Minds Eye

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Animal Ears Homework
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Visual Imagery

• How many windows in your parents house?
• Which is a darker green, a Christmas tree or a
  pea?
• Which is bigger, a popsicle or a pack of
  cigarettes?

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Test of matrix memory

• Imagine a 4 x 4 matrix
• Place the numbers 1-8 in the matrix following my
  instruction
• Start in the leftmost square in the second row
  down from the top

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In the first square, put a 1
6
In the square to the right, place a 2
7
In the square below, place a 3
8
In the square to the right, place a 4
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In the square below, place a 5
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In the square to the left, place a 6
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In the square to the left, place a 7
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In the square above, place an 8
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Solution
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Mental Rotation

• Shepard and Metzler (1971)

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Battle of the Brains !

• Propositional
• Zenon Pylyshyn
• Information is coded in terms of symbols and
  relationships, not pictures
• Info is not tied to the modality in which it was
  stored

• Analog (Depictive)
• Stephen Kosslyn
• Knowledge is organized as it was stored
• There are pictures in the head (more or less)

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Are Images Visual?

• Pylyshyn (1973)
• Image interpretation
• Stored images need an index
• Indeterminate information
• Mental pictures have less info than normal
  pictures

Kosslyn (pointing, brain)
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Are Images Visual?

• Kosslyn, Ball Reiser (1978)

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Are Images Visual?

• Brain evidence
• Visual areas are active for imagery tasks
• Motor and visual areas active for mental rotation
• Patient studies
• Damaged ventral stream cant do object imagery
• Damaged dorsal stream cant do spatial imagery
• But, there are people with damaged object
  perception that can imagine objects